Muhammad Fahim Vohra

Colonial Ways of Life

The process of carving a new civilization out of an abundant "New World" involved often-violent encounters among European, African, Indian cultures. War, duplicity, displacement, and enslavement're the tragic results. Yet on another level, the process of transforming the Americans continent was a story of blending and accommodation, of diverse peoples and resilient cultures engaged in the everyday tasks of building homes, planting corps, trading goods, raising families, enforcing laws, and worshipping their gods. Those who colonized America during the seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were part of a massive social migration occurring throughout Europe, and Africa. Everywhere, it seemed, people're in motion-moving from farms to village, from villages to cities, and from homelands to colonies.